Taken from: I am - A blueprint for sentience by Krys Norman
Roughly speaking, the Umonians will have the following overall attributes:
They are to consist of a main rectangular body (60cm by 40cm by 20cm) which will be about 100cm off the ground. They are all to be of a very similar shape and consist of right angles and easily recognisable points to aid recognition. Within a certain set of limits there will be variations from point of creation of each Umonian. On either side of the body will be a limb containing two powered wheels such that the being will be permanently stable and able to move forwards, backwards and turn in circles. Their bodies will be supported by their limbs and capable of lifting up and down by 20cm. The front will display a face with two eyes, two ears, a nose and mouth. The Umonians are to have two cameras in their "eyes" and be able to hear via microphones. There will be additional sensors internally to determine other parameters and they will also have WiFi and Zigbee connectivity. They will have various DSP, motor control, processing and memory blocks which will be inside the body and powered by rechargeable batteries housed within the limb sections. The ways that these aspects are used will also be explained more fully later. The eyes will house the visual sensors. The ears will located on the top corners of the front of the face and house the the audio sensors. The mouth will house a speaker from where various noises, including speech, will be emitted. The nose will contain the RF communication section. The size of the limb housing and the spacing of the face features will vary from being to being but be fixed from creation. The ratio of the spacings between eyes, nose, ears and mouth would be relatively easy to gauge as long as a Umonian was directly facing another. The overall size could be determined by the distance between the ears and the base line as long as the information from the proximity sensor was provided into the calculations.
Irrespective of the size any Umonian would be able to recognize any other once they had first met or seen a qualified image. This could even be from a screen or a printed piece of paper. The variance parameters would be the distance between the eyes, the hight of the nose, eyes and mouth relative to the ears, the size of the mouth. The total combinations of variances, even at a bell curve spread of a hundred discernible differences per parameter, could produce tens of millions of unique faces. Many could be similar but their faces would act as an identifier across their range.
There would also be many differences in capabilities of the internal workings. These would include the rate at which the processing sections worked, the numbers of errors they made and the power capabilities of their motors. There would be a link between these capability parameters and the visual spacings which would contribute to the desirability and beauty responses discussed later.
One of the counter intuitive aspects of this model is that the Primary stage, the part that actually connects to the senses, creates a world view and makes decisions. It will be the main processing powerhouse and combine the sensed events with a positive and/or negative emotional response to each sense and combination of sensed events. As the Umonians increase their experience and repeated sequences of events result in repeated emotional reactions, beliefs will be generated. These would start with things like gravity, proximity, basic shapes etc... and be so consistent as to be programmed in as a base profile of learned beliefs.
What is generally thought of as the conciousness will exist within the primary processing area as choices of possible beliefs. The options of these would be provided by the secondary processing area. This is where possible future and abstract scenarios can be postulated with the information gained from the owners' current world view. The possibilities of what might happen in the future are so convoluted as to appear near infinite. To create even a tiny fraction of the total number of situations, sequences and behaviour would take up too much resource. Instead, these possibles will be formed from the bank of beliefs that will have, in turn, been formed from the consistency of emotional reactions of similar events. They would hold a value of probability. The secondary section will be constantly creating multiple variations of the current world view and possible resulting sequences of events due to its behaviour choices. An example is the possibility of walking off a cliff. It is a genuine option to choose to do as the Umonian will be physically capable of doing it. There is also an abstract possibility of hanging in mid air. One aspect of abstraction can be the creation of a group of all the possibilities, even though they may be very improbable and go against the basic belief set of the physical world. Instead of hanging in mid air, there is a strong probability of falling and accelerating until the ground is reached. The secondary processing area will present variations on this likely event and the primary one will make choices to avoid walking off the cliff as long as there is not a belief of a more serious threat from staying on the edge.
The secondary processing area will involve two basic abstract premises. One is that the possible scenarios happen at events in a measurable future. The other is that it involves non experience-generated beliefs, say the geography of an area that has not been visited but could exist at that point in time. These are both abstractions. One is an abstraction to an event that is not being experienced now and the other is an abstraction to an event that has not yet been experienced. The belief generated can be from that of trusted learning. This is where sequenced event information is passed to an individual from another source and that, as it is trusted, it becomes part of the belief stack even though it has not been directly experienced.
The Umonians will start with a basic health/damage/pain section already programmed. This will produce predetermined internal and external reactions irrespective of any learned behaviour. They will be created with two years of experience of the world and a set of beliefs that align with gravity, solidity, danger, laughter, basic speech and connection. They will be able to create possibilities where they talk and these will be chosen increasing the positive responses from connecting with others. Whilst this is developing they will also increase a belief that they can talk to themselves. Though they won't output the speech or hear it through their auditory sensors, they will still believe they sense it. This will allow them to increase their positive reactions due to connection even when they are not connecting with anyone externally. Even from this very similar set of programming into every being there will be huge variance generated. The genetic differentiation will be present in everyone providing a relatively small variation in fallability, processing speed, strength and desirability. Once they are created and thrust into their environment, what ever it may be, they will develop different abilities, knowledge and increasingly diverging interactive responses from then on. They will learn and do the best they can with what they've got and what happens around them. The way they choose to behave, i.e. their actions, interaction and inaction, would be viewed as their personality.